. . . I have long puzzled over a sentence in the Simonidean testimonia that tells us:
Simonides advises us to play at life and to be 100% serious about nothing.
Now I begin to see what this sentence might mean. To be 100% serious about nothing, about absence, about the void which is fullness, is the destiny and task of the poet. The poet is someone who feasts at the same table as other people. But at a certain point he feels a lack. He is provoked by a perception of absence within what others regard as a full and satisfactory present. His response to this discrepancy is an act of poetic creation; he proceeds by means of his poetic sophia [“wisdom”] to make present in the mind what is lacking from the actual. You might see it as a transcenent example of what Marx calls “surplus value,” when a poet decides to double the negative of death and say “No” to oblivion. Or you might call it a waste of words.